Quote:
Originally Posted by candybar
But it's bad advice. If you're in some dead-end job where you happened to program in PHP, you would do far better if you took it seriously and learned to become an expert than if you whined about a terrible situation you're in and and went through the motions because PHP is an inferior technology that's not worth learning.
Neither QA nor test automation isn't an objectively bad career choice. Also understanding how software design impacts test automation and vice versa is probably worth like 50K extra in annual compensation for mid-level software engineers. If you took your first job seriously and tried to learn as much about writing unit tests as you could, you'd be a better software engineer today and making more money. It's important to remember that not dismissing technologies or career choices as inferior does not mean you have to do something you don't want to do. If you decide that you want to be a dentist, that doesn't mean everyone else is making a huge career mistake by being a pediatrician, an internist or a nurse practitioner.
You're conflating two different ideas here though. One is to approach the situation you're in with a good attitude and try to learn as much as you can from it. I absolutely agree this is a good idea. But my post was about avoiding bad situations, which is something else entirely. Like your post starts with "If you're in some dead-end job where you happened to program in PHP" which, OK. But what if you're not yet in that job, or have an opportunity to move jobs? Anyone reading your post naively and literally would come away with the impression that there are no such things as better and worse technologies to work with for the advancement of one's career, which is just not true. Of course I wasn't advising Noodle Wazlib to just not try hard in his job. My advice was that, if possible, he should at some point try to move to using different technologies.
So that's point 1, but the other thing is that your post comes loaded with assumptions, one of which is that all anyone ITT wants is to increase their earnings as quickly as possible. Personally I'd take less money to not have to work with an unwieldy and internally inconsistent language, in codebases which are almost invariably abominations. It gives me less professional satisfaction to do that and generally leaves me wanting to shoot myself for most of the working day.